BUILDING SMART CITIES FOR FLOOD PROTECTION IN VIETNAM ; BUILDING AN ETHICAL DIGITAL INFRASTRUCTURE FOR SMART CITIES

Introduction
The goal of these two projects includes developing a secured, distributed data infrastructure allowing data owners to share data effortlessly and securely, while concurrently allowing data users to access data on-demand. The data infrastructure is to underpin disaster response and decision support applications. The new focus on flood forecasting and alert is recommended by our collaborator in Vietnam. The collaborating team in Vietnam has expertise and experience in urban flood modeling; and they also have access to the necessary data (e.g., roads, drainage infrastructure, rain gauges, and weather forecast). The recommended strategy is once we have developed a pilot app, our partner will convene a demo with city government agencies to get their buy in and input.
By creating this project, we hope to build an app to show what a possible smart city infrastructure could look like and the project uses the example of flooding to show this in action.

The Technical Project
In the technical report, I explored how we would develop the app. I discussed using the react framework and how we set up Amazon Web Services as the backend. I discussed what a technical infrastructure can look like for smart cities. In addition, I discussed the existing alternatives that seek to alleviate flooding problems in Vietnam.

The STS Report
In the STS report, I examined what it would take to build an ethical data infrastructure that would support collaboration across a wide variety of diverse stakeholders with differing interests. The ethical issues raised by this project are multi-faceted, but I believe that we addressed the issues. The issues we managed were cybersecurity, data ownership, data collection, and abuse concerns. To address them, I followed the Association for Computing Machinery’s ethical code of conduct. By following this approach , we were able to justify our decisions with standard industry norms.

Conclusion
In combination, these projects played the roadmap for how to build a complex technical infrastructure in a suitable and ethical way. I did this by appropriately addressing the concerns of cybersecurity, data ownership, data collection, and user abuse.
Acknowledgements
This project would not have been possible without the following team members at UVA: Professor Rich Nguyen , Ankit Gupta (3rd year CS) . Adriel Kim (4th year CS), Abhir Karande (3rd year CS), Preston Wright (4th year CS). In addition, we collaborated with Ho Chi Minh University of Science and I am grateful to our collaborates there - Professor Khoi Dao and Thuy Diem Nguyen (Undergrad RA).

 School of Engineering and Applied Science
 Bachelor of Science in Computer Science
 Technical Advisor: Rich Nguyen
 STS Advisor: Richard Jacques